Wanting His Child

The girl opened her eyes and looked thoughtfully at her. Now that she was beginning to get over her ordeal she looked very alert and intelligent and, in some odd way that Verity couldn’t quite put her finger on, slightly familiar.

‘It’s horrid having people feeling sorry for you, isn’t it?’ the girl said with evident emotion.

‘People don’t mean to be patronising,’ Verity responded. ‘But I do know what you mean…’

‘Dad told me I wasn’t to go outside the garden on my rollers.’ She gave Verity an assessing look. ‘He’ll ground me for ages—probably for ever.’ Verity waited, guessing what was coming next.

‘I don’t suppose…Well, he doesn’t have to know, does he…? I could pay for the damage to your car from my pocket money and…’

What kind of man was he, this father, who so patently made his daughter feel unloved and afraid? A man like her uncle, perhaps? A man who, whilst providing a child with all the material benefits he or she could possibly want, did not provide the far more important emotional ones?

‘No, he doesn’t have to know,’ Verity agreed, ‘as long as the hospital gives you the all clear.’

‘The hospital?’ The girl’s eyes widened apprehensively.

‘Yes, the hospital,’ Verity said firmly, closing her own door and re-starting the car.

She would be being extremely negligent in her duty as a responsible adult if she didn’t do everything within her power to make sure the girl was as physically undamaged as she looked.

‘You have to turn left here,’ the girl began and then looked closely at Verity as she realised she had started to turn without her directions. ‘Do you know the way?’

‘Yes. I know it,’ Verity agreed.

She ought to. She had gone there often enough with her uncle. Before he had moved the company’s headquarters to London, the highly specialised medical equipment he had invented and designed had been tried out in their local hospital and Verity had often accompanied him on his visits there.

One of the things she intended to do with the money from the sale of the company was to finance a special ward at the hospital named after her uncle. The rest of it…The rest of it would be used in equally philanthropic ways. That was why she had come back here to her old home town, to take time out to think about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life and to decide how other people could benefit the most from her late uncle’s money.

When they arrived at the casualty department of the hospital they were lucky in that there was no one else waiting to be seen.

The nurse, who frowned whilst Verity explained what had happened, then turned to Verity’s companion and asked her, ‘Right…Let’s start with your name.’

‘It’s…It’s Honor—Honor Stevens.’

Honor Stevens. Verity felt her heart start to plummet with the sickening speed of an out-of-control lift. She was being stupid, of course. Stevens wasn’t that unusual a name, and she was taking her own apprehension and coincidence too far to assume that just because of a shared surname that meant…

‘Address?’ the nurse asked crisply.

Dutifully Honor gave it.

‘Parents?’ she demanded.

‘Parent. I only have one—my father,’ Honor began weakly. ‘His name’s Silas. Well, really Silas Stevens.’ She pulled a face and looked at Verity, and unexpectedly told her, ‘You look…’ She stopped, looked at her again speculatively, but Verity didn’t notice.

Silas Stevens. Honor was Silas’ daughter. Why on earth hadn’t she known? Guessed? She could see so clearly now that the reason she had found Honor’s features so oddly familiar was because she was Silas’ daughter. She even had his thick, dark, unruly hair, for heaven’s sake, and those long-lashed grey eyes—they were his, no doubts about it. That disconcertingly level look was his as well and…

‘Are you feeling all right?’

Verity flushed as she realised that both Honor and the nurse were watching her.

‘I’m fine,’ she fibbed, adding dryly, ‘but it isn’t every day that I get an out-of-control roller blader courting death under my car wheels.’

And it certainly wasn’t every day that she learned that that child was the daughter of a man…of the man…What would Honor think if she knew that once Verity had believed that Silas’ children would be hers, that she would be the one to bear his babies, wear his ring, share his life…? But that had been before…Before her uncle had reminded her of where her real duty lay, and before Silas had told her so unequivocally that he had his own plans for his life and that they did not include playing second fiddle to another’s wishes, another man’s rules, another man’s business.

‘But I can’t just walk away and leave him, leave it,’ Verity had protested shakily when Silas had delivered an ultimatum to her. ‘He needs me, Silas, he expects me to take over the business…’

‘And what of my needs, my expectations?’ Silas had asked her angrily.

In the end they had made up their quarrel, but six weeks later her uncle had announced that he had made arrangements for her to go to America where she would work for a firm manufacturing a similar range of medical equipment to their own, since he believed the experience would stand her in good stead when she took over his own business. She had been tempted to refuse, to rebel, but the strictness with which he had brought her up had stopped her—that and her sense of responsibility and duty towards not just him but the business as well. The twenty-year gap which had existed between him and her father, despite the fact that they had been brothers, had meant that her father himself had been a little in awe of him, and Verity, entering his household as a shy six-year-old suddenly bereft of her parents, had been too nervous, too despairingly unhappy over the loss of her mother and father, too intimidated to even think of rebelling against his stern dictatorship so that the seeds had been sown then for her to be taught by him to obey.

Later, away from his oppressive presence, she had started to mature into her own person, to feel able to make her own judgements and have her own values and she had known then, tried then…but it had been too late…

Quickly she veiled her eyes with her lashes just in case either Honor or the nurse might read what she was feeling.

‘We’ll need to take some X-rays and of course she’ll have to see the doctor, although it doesn’t look as though anything’s wrong,’ the nurse assured Verity.

‘You’ll wait here for me. You won’t leave without me, will you?’ Honor begged Verity as the nurse indicated that she was to follow her.

‘I…’ Verity hesitated. She too knew what it was like to feel alone, to feel abandoned, to feel that you had no one.

‘Your father—’ the nurse was beginning firmly, but Honor shook her head.

‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I don’t want…He’s away…on business and he won’t be back until…until next week,’ she responded.

The nurse was pursing her lips.

‘Look, if it helps, I’ll wait…and take full responsibility,’ Verity offered.

‘Well, I don’t really know. It is most unorthodox,’ the nurse began. ‘Are you a relative, or—?’

‘She’s…she’s going to be my new mother,’ Honor cut in before Verity could say anything, and then looked pleadingly at her as the nurse looked questioningly at Verity, seeking confirmation of what she had just been told.

‘I…I’ll, er…I’ll just wait here for you,’ Verity responded, knowing that she ought by rights to have corrected Honor’s outrageous untruth, but suspecting that there was more to the girl’s fib than a mere desire to short-circuit officialdom and avoid waiting whilst the hospital contacted whoever it was that her father had left in official charge of her.

It baffled Verity that a parent—any parent, male or female—could be so grossly neglectful of their child’s welfare, but she knew, of course, that it did happen, and one of the things she intended to do with her new-found wealth was to make sure that children in Honor’s situation were not exposed to the kind of danger Honor had just suffered. What Verity wanted to do was to establish a network of secure, outside-school, protective care for children whose parents for one reason or another simply could not be there for them. She knew that what she was taking on was a mammoth task, but she was determined and it was also one that was extremely dear to her heart.

It was almost an hour before the nurse returned with Honor, pronouncing briskly that she was fine.

‘I’ll run you home,’ Verity offered as they walked back out into the early summer sunshine.

Honor had paused and was drawing a picture in the dust with the toe of her shoe.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Verity asked her.

‘Er…Dad doesn’t have to know about any of this, does he?’ Honor asked her uncomfortably. ‘It’s just…Well…’

Verity watched her gravely for a few seconds, her heart going out to her, although she kept her feelings to herself as she told her quietly, ‘Well, I’m certainly not going to say anything to him.’

Wasn’t that the truth? The thought of having anything…anything whatsoever to do with Silas Stevens was enough to bring her out in a cold panic-induced sweat, despite the fact that she would dearly have loved to have given him a piece of her mind about his appalling neglect of his daughter’s welfare.